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NIA Seminar by David Urie |
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Date: November 7, 2005
Time: 10:30am
Location: NIA, Rm 137
Rocketplane Progress Report
David M. Urie, Rocketplane Limited, Inc.
Rocketplane Limited is committed to making space travel as safe, convenient, and commonplace as air travel. We will achieve these goals by designing and building state-of-the-art reusable spacecraft, providing unparalleled human flight training and spaceflight experiences, and transporting innovative scientific experiences, and transporting innovative scientific experiments and valuable payloads to suborbital space and beyond.
A small company was started to fulfill the dreams and ambitions of a handful of people. One, a wealthy investor and space enthusiast, was also an active political insider. Funding, politics, an unexpected market and a space plane concept jelled into a development program now seventeen months underway. Many technical revisions have occurred morphing an individual’s concept into the creation of a talented team. The design, as they all do, has taken on a life of its own. I will describe the design as it stands and the growth and maturing of the design and the team. The system requirements are simple but the design choices driven by flowed-down functional requirements are, as usual, often conflicting. The design is firm now at four months until CDR. Performance will be met, cost to develop will be higher than predicted, weight is acceptable but must come down further and there will be compromises in the flight test program. Operations will start at least 6 months later than expected but I am convinced we will still beat our competitors into service. It’s a great adventure so far and I hope you find it interesting and instructive.
David M. Urie, Vice President / Program Manager
Prior to joining the Rocketplane Limited team, Mr. Urie served as president of Concept Fusion, Inc., providing technical development services to established companies and start-up organizations. During his 30-year career with the Lockheed Martin Corporation, Mr. Urie led teams on such projects as Lockheed’s X-30 National Aerospace Plane and the HL-20 Personnel Launch System. He was chief engineer and then program manager of the SR-71 reconnaissance system before initiating and heading the Single Stage to Orbit and X-33 Reusable Launch Vehicle Programs. He also served on several advanced development projects in flight sciences and operations analysis. Throughout his distinguished career, Mr. Urie has received numerous honors and awards. He has also published many articles, prepared and taught several short courses, and given numerous lectures and presentations.
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